A system with many moving parts
is prone to failure – like my knee, my foot,
with its thirty-three joints, one hundred-seventeen
shoe-string ligaments, my commute to work
consisting of a minimum two trains –
on a bad day, four each way. So many opportunities
for failure: stuck doors, worn or emergency-
activated brakes, fire on tracks, sick passenger,
power loss to switch gear. Or a jet plane
flying over the Atlantic: pilot hung over,
storm approaches, loss of one engine out of four.
How all debacles begin: never a single thing
but a series of small crises, that lead the way
to disaster, as surely as one tug on a tissue
will pull up the next. Think of the worker
who loses his job, wife falls ill, no insurance,
medical bills stacking up. The steel marble rolls
to the edge of the table and falls. Perhaps
this is what propels the man on the subway platform,
who hugs his five-year-old daughter, jumps –
-her still in his arms – in front of the oncoming train.
This is not an excuse. This is the world we live in –
sulfuric smell of metal grinding on scorched metal –
but a world, too, where those who witness
leap down to the tracks, pull the girl from underneath
the train, out of her father’s embrace,
miraculously alive and almost unscathed.
